As electronic components decrease in size and increase in power requirements, cooling individual components as well as collections of components will become increasingly important to ensure proper computing system function moving forward. For example, the size of central processing unit (CPU) dies are miniaturizing at the same time the number of cores, heat dissipation, and thermal design power (TDP) of these dies are increasing. This can result in a higher heat flux from the CPU dies and increase the challenge for thermally managing the CPU.
Legacy air cooled reference platforms are typically built per American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Class A2. In legacy implementations to support high-power dense solutions, liquid-enhanced cooling solutions are typically used where components are cooled by liquid cold plates. To capture heat and remove it, gap filler thermal interface material in thermal contact with a cold plate and one or more heat-generating components, such as a central processing unit (CPU), that on a printed circuit board (PCB). In addition, there may be other heat-generating components in proximity to the CPU on the PCB that may also generate heat.
In order to achieve the required compute performance in current platforms, the trend is to increase power and also lower the operating temperature of the device. For applications such as high performance computing and next generation computing platforms, like the Xeon platforms from Intel® Corporation of Santa Clara, Calif., the need for liquid cooling in a platform may be becoming a necessity to achieve the desired compute performance.